that this all is a complicated and self-convolving dream has more than once occurred to me; the improbability of it demands that i lie yet still in a bed in San Francisco unchanged except beneath my fluttering eyelids.

so my nose did not lie to me: you were never here except in your contemplation. so i too should not be here, following as i have a long strand that vanishes into nothingness. i should vanish like the lie that i am, this Robert Usher whose wallet and and passport have been stolen and forged. i should wake and Mara should smile.

my year runs out; my chance for redemption comes with long slow wings. that is, I hear them beat, i do not see them, i argue their manifestation with strangers, with the distraction and unconsidered purposefulness of a man performing. I remain unconvinced. johnny is dead, I carry his dead body…

in a moment of this weakness I wrote to Mara, breaking as with you the terms of my exchange. said that in the mirror i see the wrong face at times. she has not responded, of course: cannot: i have destroyed her love with this stupid, childish game, and may as well have destroyed her, along with all the old structures of my existence.

i smoke like mad now, and always with my own papers. on which i have written enough to make a world for her. oh all this money for the dead. but i should not talk about it, this only magic remaining to me after i have destroyed my last link to the old world…

i leave this empty island tomorrow. i have found, of all things, augustine’s confessions in english and latin. it is a stranger book than I remember: You seek a blessed life in the land of death; it is not there…

and, my friend “fill”: descendite, ut ascendatis, et ascendatis ad deum. descend, that ye may ascend. neither of us has sold out enough, i think.